Willing to Face It

When you’re twelve years old, ridicule seems worse than death. Showering in the locker room feels particularly risky. So I never did. 

Avoidance isn’t always a bad life strategy. The human capacity to analyze past experience and predict future harm gives us wisdom to avoid perilous activities — things like walking on the interstate and watching Nicolas Cage movies. 

Avoidance becomes a poor life strategy when it keeps us from what we value and who God longs for us to be — a person fully alive, like Jesus.

One of my personal values is friendship and relational connection. One of my biggest fears is rejection. My brain and my body go to great lengths to convince me that the best way to prevent rejection is to avoid people. And it works! For a time. Avoidance (in general) alleviates fear in the short term but compounds it in the long term. And avoiding people stands in direct opposition to what I value and who God calls me to become — a person who loves well. 

Avoidance is also a poor life strategy when a thing is unavoidable — jury duty, work deadlines, a pending diagnosis, grieving a death.

We may attempt to avoid the unavoidable (denial), but sooner or later reality sets in and with it, so often, anxiety.

Anxiety is part of the human experience. It is potential future pain made manifest in us in the present. Sometimes we can name the source of the anxiety, sometimes we can’t. Either way, we may attempt to overcome anxiety directly through what psychologists call experiential avoidance. Instead of noticing and processing unpleasant thoughts and feelings, we push them down. Instead of facing difficult situations, we avoid them. The problem with experiential avoidance is it inflames anxiety instead of alleviating it.

The story of the Passion has endless gifts and recently it gave me a new one. After Christ in the garden excavates his infinite heart and lays bare its contents, soaked in blood and sweat, before the Father—take this cup, yet not my will—he is arrested, questioned, tried by the high priest, and mocked by soldiers. Morning comes and he is bound and led to Pilate. It is this window — from the mocking to the morning — I had not noticed before. In that gap, an hour or two at most if there is any gap at all, I see Jesus in a holding cell and I sit with him. He is no longer asking for the cup to be removed, nor is he pulling into the present the awful hours to come. He is calm. He is resolute. He turns to me and says, I am not afraid. I will drink this bitter cup one sip at a time.

It feels irreverent to juxtapose, as I’m about to do, an event of such cosmic significance with one of such comic triviality. But if we want to be like Jesus in great moments we must be with him in small moments. 

A few months ago I knew it was time to face my middle school locker room fears and shower in that dreaded tile cavern with many showerheads and nowhere to hide. The fears, of course, were irrational. The average age in our YMCA men’s room at 7:45am is eighty. Great swaths of skin and sag are on display and precisely no one cares. But no amount of telling yourself no one cares can counteract a body-bound anxiety fortified by a lifetime of avoidance. No amount of telling yourself how silly it is for a grown man to feel this way makes the child in him grow up. You simply have to take a breath, thank the nail-pierced Christ that he cares about every inch of our little lives, and do the thing. Then do it again the next day. And the next. It does get easier. Now, months later, my pulse stays steady while I undress. I’m not in a hurry (and also not lingering!) I’m not irrationally worried about what others think. Praise God, it’s wonderfully mundane.

Not every fear is so clear and simple to face. But whatever comes each day, if we are willing to face it instead of avoid it, the Father will, as Francis de Sales says, ​“either shield you from suffering, or give you unfailing strength to bear it.”